Philips DVX-8000 Multimedia Home Theater (1997)
Five thousand dollars bought a Dolby Digital processor, a Pentium MMX PC, and a progressive-scan line doubler in one box. The line doubler alone was worth the price of admission.
Overview
The DVX-8000 showed up at the tail end of the 1990s convergence craze, when every major manufacturer was shoving a PC and a receiver into the same chassis and calling it the future of the living room. Most of those machines got a yawn. The Philips was different, and the reason comes down to one feature. It had a digital progressive-scan line doubler that worked on every video source fed into it, including the DVD drive's signal, taken right off the disc before any analog conversion. Run that output into a front projector and the picture was something else entirely. Run it into a direct-view or rear-projection set and the line doubler did nothing at all. That frustrated more than one prospective buyer, who wrote in to the magazines asking for a rear-projection version.
The box was about the size of a large A/V receiver. Inside were a Dolby Digital (AC-3) surround controller, an AM/FM/TV tuner, a fully loaded Pentium MMX computer running Windows 95, an integrated DVD-ROM drive, and the line doubler. Philips priced it at $5,000 and threw in a wireless keyboard with an integrated mouse, an entertainment pack of five CD-ROM games, and a $250 Marantz RC-2000 learning remote. Collectors rate that remote as one of the best system remotes ever shipped. The front panel billed the audio section as "Audio Technology by Marantz," and the A/V half was essentially a clone of Marantz's AV-550 Dolby Digital preamp, which sold on its own for around $1,000.
The PC side was no token effort. It had a 233-MHz Pentium MMX, a 3.1-gigabyte hard drive, 32 megabytes of RAM upgradable to 128, a 512-kilobyte pipeline burst cache, a 33.6-kilobit/second fax modem, and a 1.44-megabyte floppy drive. The internal DVD-ROM drive could read movie DVDs, DVD-ROMs, CD-ROMs, and standard music CDs, but not CD-Rs. A Trident 3-D graphics accelerator with 4 megabytes of video RAM handled gaming, and there was a connection for a joystick even if one wasn't in the box. Unlike a regular desktop, the DVX-8000 left room for only one half-length add-in card. Buyers who wanted to expand it later ran out of room fast.
The connections reflect the machine's split personality. Three digital inputs served the surround section: one coaxial, one Toslink optical, and one RF-type for a laserdisc player with an AC-3 output. The internal DVD drive didn't use up any of them, so those three inputs typically went further than owners expected. Six RCA analog audio inputs, four of them paired with composite- and S-video, plus three tape loops for two VCRs and an audio deck, covered the analog side. Multichannel outputs to the power amps were RCAs, as was a single pair of multiroom outputs. Composite and S-video connectors were provided for the TV monitor outputs and the VCR 1 tape loop. The surround processing ran on Yamaha DSP chips for Dolby Digital and Dolby Pro Logic. Analog Dolby Surround sources (off-air and cable TV, satellite, Hi-Fi VCR tapes) were converted to digital by a Crystal ADC before the DSP stage, then back to analog afterward through a bank of Philips TDA1305P bitstream DACs. The unit wasn't Home THX-certified, but it did include Cinema Re-Equalization, the high-frequency roll-off that tames overly bright movie soundtracks. Alongside Dolby Digital and Pro Logic were the usual "Hall," "Matrix," and "Movie" modes, plus a bypass that sidestepped the converters entirely for analog two-channel listening.
Audio (February 1998, p.71) tested the DVX-8000 with a Runco IDP980 projector and a 100-inch screen. The reviewer came away convinced the line doubler was the whole point. He called the direct-digital, line-doubled DVD picture the best he'd seen from the format, and reckoned the DVD drive and doubler alone made the Philips an absolute steal, even leaving out the PC and preamp sections. The same review found the Dolby Pro Logic and stereo D/A modes merely acceptable, not as smooth as the Dolby Digital and stereo bypass modes, and said the Philips begged for a good stand-alone CD player or external D/A converter for serious two-channel listening. Audio (February 1998, p.72) also noted that the line-doubling made even VHS tapes look far better than they had any right to on a 100-inch screen. The same reviewer admitted the tapes looked cringe-worthy between tracks, with the first few seconds of each song sometimes cut off.
The PC drew mixed notices. The same Audio review (February 1998, p.71) found it big and fast, with no complaints about the machine or its wireless keyboard. It praised how thoroughly Philips integrated A/V source control with the Windows 95 desktop, and the reviewer called it the only convergence product he'd seen that actually made sense. The gaming angle fell flat for at least one writer, who confessed to spending his adolescence in front of an Atari 800 and finding it impossible to work up enthusiasm for another video game, no matter how realistic the flight simulation. The verdict on the machine as a whole was warmer than that. As the first product of its kind, it would have merited attention even if its performance were average, and its performance was not average.
Anyone chasing one today should know what they're getting into. This is a 1997 Windows 95 machine with a 233-MHz Pentium MMX and a 3.1-gigabyte hard drive. The PC half is a preservation project in its own right, and the DVD-ROM drive's inability to read CD-Rs is a real inconvenience for anyone hoping to load software from burned discs. The line doubler works only with front projectors, so the signature feature is useless without the right display, and good front projectors from the period are their own rabbit hole. The Marantz RC-2000 remote is frequently missing from used examples and is worth having on its own. The best part is the video path, a purely digital, progressive-scan DVD signal that, by the account of the period press, beat rigs costing many times more. Buyers should confirm the remote, the wireless keyboard, and the entertainment-pack discs are present, and should expect to do some work on the PC side before the machine does anything at all.
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